Consumer Experience (CX) Digital Tools for Dematerialisation for the Circular Economy - for the design of a new generation of 'Product Cultures' that promote human wellbeing and people's agency in environmental sustainability The much expounded sustainability strategy of dematerialisation - buying less and extending the life of products - is now starting to gain significant traction in the general consciousness on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our eco-design strategy for dematerialisation is focused on gaining a fine grained understanding of human experience in order to extend 'product offerings' that would decouple the use of material resources from human wellbeing and economic development, by designing experiences and services related to products that include care, update/upgrade, repair, and recycling. The central idea is that by designing experiences and services for products, value that is based on human wellbeing needs can be added to them. We aim to shape new cultures of consumption that will meet the demands of the market for greater sustainability, whilst giving consumers greater agency to respect their environment - becoming custodians rather than consumers. This requires a new relationship between consumers and their products. We believe that experiences and services for products must be constituents of this relationship, hence the challenge is to translate our understanding of needs related to human wellbeing into the design of product-experience-service offerings. We will innovate CX Digital Tools to support experiences and services for physical apparel products that are related to care, repair and update/upgrade in order to keep apparel in use for as long as possible. We will define a set of scenarios and associated technologies for new cultures of CE, by gaining understanding of how social and digital actors (the consumer-public, charity shops, repair initiatives, clothes swapping initiatives, apparel brands, retailers, and digital-electronics hacker communities) come together to enact a CE. We will innovate new sensing and perceptual technologies based on novel computer vision and machine learning architecture to be used by consumers to understand materials and materials degradation, to make decisions of material reparation and to express their perceptions around aged, repaired, updated/upgraded products. We will evaluate user interactions and perceptions derived from scenarios, with a methodological contribution to the evaluation that combines our HCI, social sciences, design and phenomenological approaches. The CX Digital Tools is designed and specified using our Circular Experience Model we have conceptualised, which has four categories: 1) Pre-Ownership; 2) During Ownership; 3) Giving up Ownership; 4) Post Ownership. We will use these four categories to design a set of experiences and services for apparel products that are focused on the human perceptual experience of materials - specifically, materials from waste and recycled materials, ageing and wear, repair, and update/upgrade. We will adopt a Citizen Science approach in order to design and test experiences and services with consumers and stakeholders. Through this approach we will ensure that we are reducing the need to develop new technology products, as we will seek to work with digital technologies that consumers already possess, which forms part of our approach to mitigate environmental impacts both in our research programme as in the outcomes of it. This 30 month project will be led by the Materials Science Research Centre at the Royal College of Art in partnership with UCL - the University College London Interaction Centre, Computer Science Department, and the Knowledge Lab.

The current global fashion supply chain is characterised by its lack of transparency, forced labour, poor working conditions, unequal power relationships and overproduction caused by fast fashion. Lacking ethics, the global fashion supply chain is also highly polluting. The total footprint of clothing in use in the UK, including global and territorial emissions, was 26.2 million tonnes CO2 in 2016, up from 24 million tonnes in 2012 (equivalent to over a third of household transport emissions). The Textiles Circularity Centre (TCC) proposes materials security for the UK by circularising resource flows of textiles. This will stimulate innovation and economic growth in the UK textile manufacturing, SME apparel and creative technology sectors, whilst reducing reliance on imported and environmentally and ethically impactful materials, and diversifying supply chains. The TCC will provide underpinning research understanding to enable the transition to a more circular economy that supports the brand 'designed and made in the UK'. To enact this vision, we will catalyse growth in the fashion and textiles sector by supporting the SME fashion-apparel community with innovations in materials and product manufacturing, access to circular materials through supply chain design, and consumer experiences. Central to our approach is to enable consumers to be agents of change by engaging them in new cultures of consumption. We will effect a symbiosis between novel materials manufacturing and agentive consumer experiences through a supply chain design comprised of innovative business models and digital tools. Using lab-proven biotechnology, we will transform bio-based waste-derived feedstock (post-consumer textiles, crop residues, municipal solid waste) into renewable polymers, fibres and flexible textile materials, as part of a CE transition strategy to replace imported cotton, wood pulp and synthetic polyester fibres and petrochemical finishes. We will innovate advanced manufacturing techniques that link biorefining of organic waste, 3D weaving, robotics and additive manufacturing to circular design and produce flexible continuous textiles and three-dimensional textile forms for apparel products. These techniques will enable manufacturing hubs to be located on the high street or in local communities, and will support SME apparel brands and retailers to offer on-site/on-demand manufacture of products for local customisation. These hubs would generate regional cultural and social benefits through business and related skills development. We will design a transparent supply chain for these textiles through industrial symbiosis between waste management, farming, bio-refinery, textile production, SME apparel brands, and consumer stakeholders. Apparel brands will access this supply chain through our digital 'Biomaterials Platform', through which they can access the materials and data on their provenance, properties, circularity, and life cycle extension strategies. Working with SME apparel brands, we will develop an in-store Configurator and novel affective and creative technologies to engage consumers in digitally immersive experiences and services that amplify couplings between the resource flow, human well being and satisfaction, thus creating a new culture of consumption. This dematerialisation approach will necessitate innovation in business models that add value to the apparel, in order to counter overproduction and detachment. Consumers will become key nodes in the circular value chain, enabling responsible and personalised engagement. As a human-centred design led centre, TCC is uniquely placed to generate these innovations that will catalyse significant business and skills growth in UK textile manufacturing, SME fashion-apparel, and creative technology sectors, and drastically reduce waste and carbon emissions, and environmental and ethical impacts for the textiles sector.